Top 5 lessons to learn from Instagram

Top 5 lessons to learn from Instagram

Here's what made the 2-year-old start-up an overnight star. Illustrations by Dominic Xavier

The popular photo-sharing app Instagram was bought by Facebook earlier last week for an obscene valuation (which is enough to give each team member at Instagram, $77 million)!

While the amount Facebook paid for the app has raised a lot of questions, it is still a good success story that all of us can learn from.

So, what did the 2-year old company do right?

The author is a technologist and blogger with over a decade of experience with software products. He has a degree in Computer Science and an MBA from ISB. Most recently, he was a Product Manager at Google, managing some of their enterprise products.

1. Build it right and they will come!

Not even the 2ndor the 10th. But what really made Instagram stand out was that it was really easy to use, and provided real value to photographers and photo lovers.

They were not only able to pick features that would be most used, but more importantly resisted from adding unnecessary features (No timeline, no "related pictures", no categorisation, no "tag friends" etc...).

The features that they did build, they did well. Instagram is not the first app to integrate photo filters, but they are built so well into the app that it makes them really useful and simple. Plus, the app is beautiful. It looks and feels great to use.

The attention to detail is also awesome! It's signup page has exactly 3 required fields (email, username and password).

Clicking on any button does exactly what you expect it to. It doesn't spam your facebook/twitter feeds without your permission.

The attention to detail has allowed the app to differentiate itself, and in the hyper-competitive mobile-app world, this can count for a lot.

4. Build your own network

Instagram's social strategy was not just to leverage existing social networks for sharing, but to build its own, supplemental network.

This is an important (and brave, for 2010) strategic decision.

The value of a network is basically in its connections. And connections between users can be deep and structured. Especially, interest-based connections are easily monetisable by an ad-network like Facebook.

Instagram's connections complement Facebook's connections very well, and I suspect is the main reason behind the huge valuation.

Another angle is that building a graph of users is a threat to Facebook, which sees itself as the owner of the world's social graph.